December by Filemon Liyambo – Full Plot Summary, Analysis, Themes & Discussion Questions

 

Previous Story: The Neighbourhood Watch by Remy Ngamije (Namibia)

Previously, we explored The Neighbourhood Watch by Rémy Ngamije — a lyrical yet unsparing portrait of urban survival and human resilience under Windhoek’s bridges. We now turn to another Namibian voice, Filemon Liyambo, whose story December captures a different rhythm of life — not of homelessness, but of homecoming, reckoning, and the tender disquiet that memory leaves behind.

Introduction

In “December,” Namibian writer Filemon Liyambo delivers a moving tale of family, silence, and the cruel inheritance of trauma. The story, both intimate and layered, follows September Shikongo as he returns home from abroad to visit his mentally ill sister, December, who is confined in a psychiatric ward. Through this simple premise, Liyambo excavates the deep fissures in a family’s history — where madness, secrecy, and superstition blur into one indistinguishable inheritance.

Set against the textured backdrop of modern Namibia — a country wrestling with the collision between tradition and modernity — “December” captures the quiet ache of sibling love and the weight of things left unsaid. It is a story about what endures even when reason falters: tenderness, guilt, and the haunting persistence of memory.

Plot Summary

Opening: a small, sharp moment that sets everything in motion

The story opens in an ordinary, slightly embarrassing place — a small-town KFC. September Shikongo sits alone and orders only chips. The waitress looks at him as if he has committed a social crime; her deathly stare and sneer prompt September to remember his stern grandfather, Ezekiel, who used to judge him for “traces of idiotism.” The chips taste “soft” — the same way his sister December preferred them. That small, seemingly pointless detail (soft chips, extra tomato sauce) becomes the sensory trigger that threads the narrative: food as memory, a childhood cue that pulls the past into the present.

Flashback: the garden mishap that ties the siblings together

We are shown a key childhood scene in concentrated, almost mythic form. Four-year-old September loved to hide among the tomato plants while his older sister December weeded. She swung a hoe and struck him accidentally, creating a “small but deep gash” on his head. December ripped her own t-shirt to bind the wound — the t-shirt had been a gift from a British volunteer teacher — and nursed him until he healed. The scar and the torn shirt become durable tokens: a literal wound linking the siblings and an act of sacrificial care that shapes family memory.

The family matrix: names, habit, and the unspoken rule about chicken

Liyambo layers family detail onto this memory. Their father, Silas, named his children after months (a rebellious, eccentric habit) — but he did so without regard to accuracy: December was born in September; September was born in July. Time and naming are slightly askew in the family, and that slippage becomes a recurring motif.

Crucially: December does not eat chicken. This is not explained medically; it is an edict from the grandfather, Ezekiel, who simply says, “That’s how things are.” September suspects the old man is hiding something. The prohibition stands as a puzzling taboo — an unanswered question that will sit at the story’s center.

Journey to the psychiatric ward: modern places, old suspicions

September travels to the hospital to visit December. At the gate a security guard questions him; she checks his ID, scans his bag, and mutters into a radio. The hospital itself shows mixed signs of modernity and neglect — renovated paint that’s already peeling, missing letters on the casualty sign, and reinforced bars on the psychiatric-ward windows. These physical details mirror the story’s double vision: progress wears a thin veneer; it cannot hide deeper fissures.

Family history: Josef, “idiotism,” and Ezekiel’s interpretive frame

We learn more about Ezekiel’s worldview. He calls a younger brother’s chronic confusion “idiotism” — an insult and a folk diagnosis. That brother, Josef, lost track of time as a youth and at one point was gone for a month; later he was found after Ezekiel dreamt of a pond where leopards drank. Because of Josef, Ezekiel interprets December’s sudden decline (from excellent student to someone walking half-naked and talking to herself) through the language of bewitching and spiritual causation rather than medical or psychological terms. For Ezekiel, the pattern is familiar and threatening: inexplicable mental collapse that must be named in traditional terms.

December’s decline, the ward visits, and the pattern of their meetings

Liyambo describes December’s descent as gradual and then sudden: “unraveled the way a thread comes loose: in parts and then all at once.” She was once a stellar student headed for teachers’ college; a few months before exams she began to slide into episodes and was eventually admitted to the psychiatric unit.

September’s visits follow a ritual. He brings food (never chicken — he honors the taboo), asks how she is, and is met with December’s habitual reply: “Fine.” In the ward garden, among three beds of yellow irises, she sometimes pleads to him in their language: phrases that suggest both weariness of the hospital and a desire to go home. September sometimes cannot tell whether she means the ward or her own mind. He wants to promise her release but refuses to make promises he cannot keep.

Bureaucracy and recognition: the nurse, security, and Tshuuveni

On one visit, a nurse rebukes September for being late; she calls security. While he waits, a familiar face appears: Tshuuveni, an old acquaintance who now works for private security. Tshuuveni smooths things over, sending the larger officers away. But when the nurse asks whether he is family, she claims “December doesn’t have a brother” — there is “no brother listed in her file, only a grandfather.” September produces his ID, his student card, and a photograph; still the hospital bureaucracy has its distance. The nurse softens and grants him 20 minutes.

The reunion: tenderness, gifts, and fragile normalcy

When September finally sees December she greets him warmly — “Ka Brother!” — a small, intimate greeting that cuts through the ward’s institutional chill. Her hair is patchy, her eyes bright, her body gaunt and swollen in places from previous collisions with walls. The siblings talk as they once did: jokes, examinations, gentle teasing. September brings a grey hoodie/jersey, a pen and puzzle book (which she riffles through), and a navy t-shirt with the Union Jack — the same flag that once adorned the shirt December tore to save him. These objects are acts of repair: he tries to stitch their shared past back together with gifts that carry memory.

She notices his scar and he rubs it with a rueful tenderness. Their exchange is ordinary and extraordinary: December eats the chips he brought and praises them. For a short time, the ward’s rigidity dissolves into sibling intimacy.

The parting and promise that will not be kept

Their physical separation is sudden: the nurse intervenes, comforts December with “Ngula nalyo esiku” — Tomorrow is also a day — and the visit ends. December calls after him to come on time tomorrow. September promises, knowing inwardly he will not keep that promise. The promise functions as a tiny ritual of hope that the narrative immediately undercuts.

Death, secret, and the buried explanation

The next day — in a compression of time that is both abrupt and fated — September buries Ezekiel next to his father in the village graveyard. It is October — the detail emphasizes the nonlinearity of the family’s months and names. At the funeral we learn that Ezekiel had been haunted by a dream the month Josef went missing; that dream led to Josef’s discovery. Ezekiel had planned, at one point, to explain to September why he forbade December from eating chicken (a reason tied to that garden incident), but he never did. He died holding the secret. The story ends on this withheld explanation: the taboo remains unexplained, a silence turned into inheritance.

Closing: what the plot leaves us with

Plotwise, December is deceptively simple: a brother returns, visits his sister, buries the patriarch, and leaves with unanswered questions. But Liyambo arranges small scenes — the chips, the torn t-shirt, the hospital bureaucracy, the garden accident, Ezekiel’s dreams — so they accumulate into a full, tragic picture. The final absence of explanation is itself the point: the family’s secret, the grandfather’s silence, and December’s stalled life are the true events the plot wants us to feel.

In other words: the story’s action is small; its movement is emotional and forensic. By the last line, the reader understands not only the sequence of events but the weight of the things not said — and how that weight shapes every character’s choices.

Interpretation of the Title

The title “December” carries multiple layers of meaning. It refers not only to the sister’s name but also to the symbolic season of endings — a month that closes the year and ushers in reflection, decay, and sometimes death. December, as a character, represents both the warmth of childhood and the cold descent into illness; she embodies memory, loss, and the cyclical nature of time.

Her brother’s name, September, signifies beginnings — a time of harvest and promise. The two names thus form a poignant paradox: one marking renewal, the other closure. Their bond, then, becomes an allegory for the tension between hope and despair, sanity and breakdown, past and present. Liyambo uses the naming to suggest that some families are trapped in seasons that never change — forever shifting between beginnings that end too soon and endings that never fully close.

Themes

1. Family and Silence — how reticence becomes inheritance

Core claim: The Shikongo household is sustained by omission. Silence is not neutral here; it is a governing force that protects reputation while imprisoning understanding.

Textual anchors & analysis

• The grandfather’s recurring line, “That’s how things are,” (about December’s no-chicken rule) is a masterstroke of avoidance. It refuses to explain; it transforms a specific event into a generalized command. The phrase functions as a cultural talisman that shuts down inquiry — and therefore healing.

• When the nurse says “There is no brother listed in her file,” the hospital’s paperwork literalizes the family’s social erasure. September must produce ID, photos and the truth of his relationship; the institution initially refuses to see him. This echoes family silence: identity is a thing mediated by documents — and by what elders choose to say.

• Ezekiel’s secret — the story’s withheld nucleus — is finally described only as “a secret he took to the grave.” The narrative choice to let us not hear it makes silence itself a character: authoritative, heavy, transmissible.

Why it matters

• Silence functions like a law in the family; obedience replaces explanation. Liyambo shows the moral cost: relationships calcify, children grow with partial maps of their own lives, and care becomes ritual rather than conversation.

Close-reading prompt

• Read the exchange where September asks about chicken and Ezekiel answers “That’s how things are.” Analyze how the syntax (short, absolute) mirrors patriarchal closure.

2. Mental Illness and Stigma — cultural frames vs. human suffering

Core claim: Liyambo stages two divergent interpretive systems: Ezekiel’s spiritual frame (bewitching, “idiotism”) and September’s humane, frustrated confusion. The clash exposes how stigma colonizes illness.

Textual anchors & analysis

• December’s decline is described as “unravel[ing] the way a thread comes loose: in parts and then all at once.” The textile simile gives us process and suddenness — an illness that is both gradual and catastrophic.

• Ezekiel’s framing—calling Josef’s condition “idiotism” and asserting bewitching for December — converts behavior into moral failure or supernatural punishment, which justifies hiding and control rather than care.

• The hospital’s reinforced window bars and the nurse’s brusque treatment show the institutional face of stigma — clinical, bureaucratic, and impersonal. Even “modern” structures do not necessarily bring compassion.

Why it matters

• Liyambo doesn’t present a binary (traditional evil vs. modern cure). Instead he shows how both superstition and cold bureaucracy fail the person at the center — December — leaving her “on pause.”

Close-reading prompt

• Analyze the ward garden scene (the three beds of yellow irises) as a visual counterpoint: a cultivated, fragile place for a mind falling apart. What does the garden suggest about attempts to domesticate madness?

3. Memory, Guilt, and Inheritance — the wound as family heirloom

Core claim: The physical scar, the torn T-shirt, and the forbidden chicken are not trivia; they are mnemonic tokens — the family’s archive of guilt, care, and secrecy.

Textual anchors & analysis

• The childhood vignette (tomato plants, the hoe, December ripping her T-shirt to stem the bleeding) is focal: a small accident becomes mythic. The ripped t-shirt (a British volunteer’s gift) ties individual memory to colonial trace; it reappears as a Union Jack T-shirt September brings back — an act of repair, literal and symbolic.

• The scar on September’s head is an embodied memory: when the nurse notes “You still have the scar,” the story compresses childhood into a present signifier that both connects and haunts them.

• Josef’s disappearance and Ezekiel’s dream (the pond with leopards) show that the family already has a traumatic script. Ezekiel’s dream saved Josef once, which gives his silence the weight of precedent — and so secrets become a procedural family response.

Why it matters

• Liyambo proposes that families transmit trauma the way they transmit names: as facts with emotional freight. Memory can comfort (the t-shirt, the chips) and condemn (guilt, taboo).

Close-reading prompt

• Track the Union Jack motif: torn shirt → present t-shirt. How does repeated textile imagery function as a (failed) mending of past harm?

4. Love and Helplessness — small acts against irreparable loss

Core claim: The story’s most humane moments are humble: chips, a hoodie, a puzzle book. These gestures show love’s limits and its persistence.

Textual anchors & analysis

• September’s modest gifts — chips (soft), puzzle book (half solved), jersey, the Union Jack t-shirt — are acts of tender ritual. They are not cures; they are memory-work. The “soft” chips echo childhood preference and become a sensory bridge between sanity and illness.

• December’s simple responses — “Fine” and “Ka Brother!” — are both comforting and heartbreaking. They reveal a person who is partially present, partially elsewhere; her gratitude shows personal continuity despite clinical rupture.

• The nurse’s line “Ngula nalyo esiku” — Tomorrow is also a day — is a institutionalized hope that doubles as postponement. September knows it will be broken, which exposes the gulf between intention and action.

Why it matters

• Liyambo refuses melodrama. Instead he honors small human economies of care, which are real and necessary even as they fail to deliver full rescue.

Close-reading prompt

• Read the scene where September wipes tomato sauce from December’s lips. Discuss how that micro-gesture indexes decades of care and the intimacy of sibling role reversal.

5. Tradition versus Modernity — both inadequate in different ways

Core claim: Liyambo sets superstition and modern institutionalism side by side to show a shared failure: both misread the human interior.

Textual anchors & analysis

• Ezekiel’s belief in dreams and bewitching sits alongside the renovated hospital with missing letters on the sign and reinforced bars. The novel’s details create parallel façades — an old epistemology and a modern bureaucracy — both with cosmetic fixes and structural blindspots.

• The nurse’s bureaucratic insistence (visiting chart, “you’re late,” no brother on file) demonstrates how modern systems produce alienation when they lack cultural sensitivity.

• The grandfather’s dream that led to Josef’s rescue gives traditional knowledge legitimacy; yet the very same tradition can silence and stigmatize. The text refuses easy valorization of either pole.

Why it matters

• Liyambo asks: if neither tradition nor modern institutions can fully hold a person who is unwell, what does society owe? The story invites readers to critique both romanticization and technocratic indifference.

Close-reading prompt

• Compare the description of the hospital’s new glass doors with the reinforced bars on the windows. What does that contrast tell you about the state’s ambivalence toward care and containment?

Character Analysis

September Shikongo

September stands at the emotional and moral core of the story — the reader’s window into the haunting silences that define the Shikongo family. Having left Namibia to study abroad, he returns home carrying the weight of success and guilt in equal measure. Liyambo paints him as a man straddling two worlds: the rational modernity of education and the spiritual fatalism of his roots. His visit to the psychiatric hospital to see his sister, December, is less a social duty and more a pilgrimage of remorse — an attempt to reconcile with a past he both fled and carries within him.

Through September’s eyes, we encounter the fracture between progress and tradition, science and superstition. His worldview has been shaped by Western education, yet it crumbles before the haunting reality of his sister’s condition and his grandfather’s silence. His gestures — buying chips and tomato sauce for December, teasing her gently, trying to provoke a smile — reveal not only tenderness but helplessness. Beneath his controlled demeanor lies a man tortured by what cannot be undone: a childhood accident that scarred both siblings and a lifetime of emotional distance that no amount of success can heal.

Liyambo’s choice to make September both observer and participant allows the reader to feel his divided consciousness. He embodies the tragedy of the modern African intellectual who sees too clearly the failures of both the past and the present. His eventual realization — that neither prayer nor psychiatry can fully restore his sister — becomes the story’s quiet epiphany: some wounds are communal, not clinical; they cannot be healed in isolation.

December Shikongo

December is the story’s most tragic and luminous figure — a woman once bright and promising, now lost in the labyrinth of her own mind. Her name itself carries irony: December, the month of endings, a season when life wilts and begins again. Once the family’s source of warmth and care, she now lives behind a veil of mental illness, her voice reduced to murmured repetitions of “Fine.” Through her, Liyambo confronts the stigma surrounding mental health in African societies, where such conditions are often shrouded in secrecy or attributed to witchcraft.

What makes December’s character powerful is her duality — she is both victim and mirror. Her breakdown exposes not only her own fragility but also the emotional decay of the family that failed to speak its truths. She is the living embodiment of generational silence, carrying the weight of her grandfather’s secrecy and her brother’s absence. Her madness is not random; it is inherited, cultural, systemic. Each of her fragmented thoughts gestures toward an unspoken history, a trauma so old that it has become invisible.

When she recognizes September but cannot sustain the recognition, the scene becomes devastatingly symbolic — a portrait of memory and loss intertwining. December’s final plea for another visit, simple yet shattering, captures the story’s emotional essence: love yearning for constancy in a world that keeps abandoning its broken ones.

Ezekiel Shikongo

Ezekiel, the patriarch, stands as the story’s shadow — a man whose silence governs the family’s suffering. Liyambo portrays him not as villain but as emblem: the embodiment of a generation that equates authority with secrecy. He clings to the traditions and superstitions of the past, interpreting his granddaughter’s illness as a spiritual affliction rather than a medical one. His refusal to confront reality — or to reveal the truth about the past — creates the psychological environment in which both December’s madness and September’s guilt fester.

Ezekiel’s power is brittle because it rests on denial. His authority, drawn from custom and religion, begins to feel hollow in the face of modernity. When he prohibits the eating of chicken, when he warns against questioning family mysteries, he reveals how fear can masquerade as wisdom. His eventual death symbolizes the passing of an old order — but one that leaves its descendants trapped in its silence. Even in death, Ezekiel remains the keeper of the family’s unspoken pain, the ghost whose secrets haunt the living.

Through him, Liyambo critiques the patriarchal structures that prize dignity over dialogue, and tradition over truth. Ezekiel’s legacy is a house of silence — a silence inherited like blood, binding his descendants long after he is gone.

Tshuuveni

Tshuuveni, though appearing briefly, serves as a poignant counterpoint to the Shikongos’ insular grief. Once December’s admirer and now a hospital security guard, he embodies the ordinary endurance of the forgotten — those who adapt and survive while others collapse under memory’s weight. His brief reunion with September reveals traces of what might have been: friendship, love, and communal belonging, all eroded by time and tragedy.

Through Tshuuveni, Liyambo subtly illustrates the continuity of rural life amid urban decay — how even those with limited means carry quiet dignity. His simple questions, his recognition of September, and his gentle humor create a small oasis of humanity in the sterile, crumbling hospital. He reminds both September and the reader that the past still breathes in fragments of kindness, even when surrounded by despair.

More symbolically, Tshuuveni bridges two worlds: the one that stayed and the one that left. His presence emphasizes what the Shikongo family has lost — connection, conversation, and compassion. In a story filled with silence, Tshuuveni speaks the language of ordinary care, the only kind that still makes sense in a world where reason and faith have failed.

Stylistic Devices

1. Symbolism

Liyambo’s prose is steeped in symbols that transform ordinary details into emotional signposts.

The recurring image of food — especially the chips, tomato sauce, and forbidden chicken — functions as more than a motif of sustenance; it becomes a vessel of memory, guilt, and lost intimacy. When September brings chips to his sister, the gesture recalls their shared childhood — those tender, unspoken moments before madness and silence settled into the family. Yet December’s refusal to eat chicken, the one food Ezekiel had once banned, anchors the story’s psychological weight. Chicken becomes the symbol of unspoken taboo, of ancestral secrets festering beneath familial order.

The Union Jack T-shirt carries layered meaning. Once torn by the grandfather to bandage a bleeding wound in childhood, it now resurfaces as a memento of both care and colonial residue. Its presence speaks to the twin inheritances of personal trauma and historical domination — a past stitched together with pain and pride. By reintroducing the same shirt years later, Liyambo captures how objects can outlive explanations, how fabric can hold the scent of memory long after the heart has forgotten.

2. Irony

Irony threads through “December” with quiet intelligence. The children’s mismatched names — September and December — mark an early sign of disorder within the Shikongo family. Their father, Ezekiel, mistakenly recorded the months of their births, an error that becomes prophetic. The misnaming reflects the larger absurdities of life: that even in attempts at order, chaos sneaks in; that identity itself can be shaped by error.

Ezekiel’s so-called “idiotism,” his insistence on old rituals and refusal to confront mental illness, drips with tragic irony. The patriarch who demands respect as the family’s moral compass is himself trapped in ignorance, preserving the very conditions that breed suffering. Liyambo thus crafts irony not for humor but for lament — to show how reason, when twisted by fear, becomes its own form of madness.

3. Imagery

Liyambo’s imagery is cinematic yet restrained, his language painting landscapes heavy with silence. The hospital appears as both institution and metaphor — “a place where hope smells faintly of disinfectant.” Its flaking paint and missing letters from the signboard stand as visual shorthand for a society that renovates surfaces while neglecting the soul beneath.

The village is rendered in sensory detail — the parched earth, the wind carrying dust and memory, the cracked lips of a matriarch who still prays for rain. These images echo the story’s internal drought, where emotional aridity mirrors the physical environment.

Most haunting is the image of December herself: frail, almost translucent, her presence half between worlds. Liyambo’s description of her trembling hands, her vacant eyes that briefly brighten at her brother’s arrival, creates an atmosphere at once sacred and sorrowful. Her body becomes the terrain where love and loss converge — fragile, beautiful, and beyond repair.

4. Dialogue

The story’s dialogue is economical — each line heavy with implication. Characters rarely say what they mean; instead, meaning hovers in the pauses. When December repeatedly answers “Fine” to September’s questions, it becomes a refrain of denial and despair — a defense mechanism against a reality too painful to articulate.

Ezekiel’s speech, meanwhile, is authoritative yet evasive. His few utterances conceal more than they reveal, suggesting that in the Shikongo household, silence is the true mother tongue. The contrast between September’s probing questions and his father’s clipped responses dramatizes the central conflict — a struggle not for information, but for emotional truth.

Liyambo uses dialogue sparingly to highlight disconnection: every word spoken reminds the reader of everything left unsaid. In this way, silence itself becomes a character — omnipresent, omnipotent, suffocating.

5. Foreshadowing

Foreshadowing operates in “December” like a slow shadow creeping across memory. The early scene at KFC, where September remarks that the chips are too soft and the chicken too oily, seems trivial at first but later assumes grave significance. It subtly hints at December’s aversion to chicken, an aversion rooted in a buried family secret — one that binds food, memory, and guilt into a single haunting thread.

Similarly, the repeated imagery of rain — or rather, its absence — whispers of emotional drought. December’s plea for another visit, her fragile smile at her brother’s jokes, all gesture toward an ending that feels inevitable yet still heartbreaking. Each small detail anticipates the story’s closing revelation: that reconciliation, like rain, may never come, and that love often arrives too late to save what it seeks to heal.

Moral Lessons

1. Love Endures Even When Reason Falters

Through September’s unwavering tenderness toward his sister, Liyambo reminds us that love often outlives logic. Despite his education, his travels, and his modern understanding of the world, September cannot explain or cure December’s madness — yet he chooses to sit beside her, to buy her chips, to listen even when her words make no sense. His compassion transcends understanding; it is love stripped of condition and pride.

In a world where people often retreat from what they cannot fix, September’s quiet persistence becomes the story’s moral heartbeat. He teaches that true healing begins not in the laboratory or the church, but in presence — in showing up for the broken without expecting to mend them.

2. Silence Can Be as Destructive as Violence

The Shikongo family’s greatest wound is not physical or spiritual — it is the silence that festers among them. Ezekiel’s refusal to speak about December’s condition, or about the accident that scarred both grandchildren, poisons the air of the household. His version of love is protective but suffocating, rooted in secrecy rather than truth.

Liyambo exposes how families, in their quest to avoid shame, often inflict deeper pain through what they leave unsaid. The result is generational trauma — where silence replaces empathy, and the unspoken becomes unbearable. The story urges us to break such silences before they calcify into destiny.

3. Mental Illness Deserves Empathy, Not Fear

At the heart of “December” lies a powerful social critique: the stigmatization of mental illness in African communities. December’s condition is treated not as an ailment but as an omen — a curse, a punishment, a mark of disgrace. Her grandfather prays and performs rituals instead of seeking sustained care, illustrating how fear of spiritual contamination replaces compassion for human suffering.

Liyambo’s portrayal is both tender and radical: he insists that madness is not moral failure but human vulnerability. By showing December’s gentleness and her flashes of lucidity, he dismantles the myth of the “possessed” and restores dignity to the mentally ill. The lesson is clear — empathy must replace superstition if healing is ever to begin.

4. Tradition Must Evolve

Ezekiel represents a generation that clings to tradition as a shield against change. Yet his unyielding faith in rituals, taboos, and secrecy ultimately isolates him and destroys the harmony he seeks to preserve. The prohibition against eating chicken, the coded references to ancestral punishment, and the fear of questioning elders all reveal how blind adherence to the past can perpetuate pain rather than wisdom.

Liyambo does not dismiss tradition altogether; rather, he calls for discernment — a renewal of cultural heritage that embraces compassion, reason, and dialogue. The moral is timeless: customs must serve humanity, not enslave it. A tradition that refuses to grow becomes a graveyard of unexamined grief.

Essay / Discussion Questions with Prompts

1. How does Filemon Liyambo use irony in the naming of his characters to reflect the story’s themes?

Prompt: Consider how the reversal of months — September born in July and December born in September — mirrors the family’s moral and emotional disarray. How do these ironic names highlight the chaos of time, memory, and identity in the Shikongo household? Discuss how the father’s “rebellious” naming habit subtly comments on generational confusion and the futility of imposing order on a disordered world.

2. In what ways does silence function as both protection and punishment in the Shikongo family?

Prompt: Identify key scenes where silence replaces conversation — such as Ezekiel’s refusal to explain December’s illness or the family’s unwillingness to discuss the childhood accident. How does this silence protect them from shame, yet simultaneously imprison them in guilt? Reflect on how Liyambo portrays silence not as absence but as a living force shaping relationships and perpetuating pain.

3. What is the significance of food imagery (chips, chicken, tomato sauce) in the story?

Prompt: Explore how food operates as a symbol of memory and affection — a thread connecting the siblings’ childhood to their broken present. Why does September choose chips, and why does chicken carry such mysterious weight? Examine how these mundane foods become vessels of nostalgia, guilt, and tenderness, turning ordinary meals into sacred acts of remembrance.

4. How does the author critique social attitudes toward mental illness in contemporary Namibia?

Prompt: Compare the contrasting perspectives of Ezekiel, who sees December’s breakdown as witchcraft, and September, who views it as a medical condition deserving empathy. How do their reactions reveal the clash between tradition and modernity? Consider also the hospital scenes — the indifferent nurse, the cold bureaucracy — as reflections of a society still uncomfortable with the realities of mental health.

5. Why do you think Ezekiel never revealed the secret behind December’s aversion to chicken?

Prompt: Speculate on what this hidden truth represents — a family curse, a moral transgression, or a moment of ancestral guilt. How does Ezekiel’s silence maintain his authority but also doom his descendants to confusion? Discuss how secrets, in this story, function as inherited burdens — shaping identity even when they are never spoken aloud.

6. Love and care from family help mentally ill people feel better.
Prompt: Reflect on how September’s gentle attention contrasts with Ezekiel’s harsh detachment. How does her compassion become a form of healing that transcends medicine? Identify scenes where emotional warmth softens the weight of December’s suffering. What might Liyambo be suggesting about the redemptive power of familial love in confronting mental illness and loneliness?

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